In the beginning of the 20th century, the “moving picture” brought on an unexpected new set of values and goals based on what is sometimes called American "ascendancy," in what some have called “the century of self." This new “self” started in the mid-19th c. with the rise of a particular literary poet, and only came to fruition in American film, an entirely new form of poetic expression which then broadcast this new selfhood worldwide. A book, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth by Paula Marantz Cohen, goes into this in great detail.
By 1920 the United States was already the center of filmmaking for the world. There were many factors that played into this: immigration and glorious California weather are just two, but it was more than economic and political and geographic realities, it was mythology rooted in theology. By the early 19th century, the myth of America was that it was a “divinely granted second chance for the human race.” Interestingly, Vachel Lindsay wrote in 1915 in The Art of the Moving Picture that America had no “Buddhist tope” (another word for stupa), meaning, presumably, that America was not enslaved by an ideological or theological past. But isn’t it even more interesting that he would mention a Buddhist anything? For, with the arrival of Buddhism in America, the search for self in America started to unfold in a whole new way, and not only in film.
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